A conversation with Mariano Suarez-Battan, CEO & Co-Founder of MURAL

“Make moments of fun, of celebration, and acknowledging that we’re all accomplishing good things together. And micro celebrations and bigger celebrations and learn how to celebrate remotely.” -Mariano Suarez-Battan

In this episode, I’m very pleased to be speaking with Mariano Suarez-Battan, CEO & Co-Founder of MURAL, a digital workspace that we at Voltage Control love to use both internally and for design sprints. Mariano says he loves to dream about new things, and sometimes he can make them come true.

Listen in to find out the power of purposeful silence, how to power up your team’s imagination at work, and why you should be blocking out time for kids and coffee.

Show Highlights

[5:10] Multi-threaded thinking in the digital realm.
[12:35] Blocking time for kids and coffee.
[17:56] Powering up imagination at work.
[26:09] Making space for celebration.
[32:56] Purposeful silence.
[37:12] Micro-celebrations, remotely.

MURAL
Mariano on LinkedIn
Mariano on Twitter

About the Guest

Mariano Suarez-Battan is the CEO and Co-founder of MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. He is accelerating innovation by providing facilitators with the tools and inspiration that they need to make global change. Before MURAL, Mariano created video games through his studio, Three Melons, which was acquired by Disney in 2010.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Podcast Sponsored by MURAL

Full Transcript

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I’m with Mariano Battan. Mariano’s the co-founder and CEO of MURAL. He’s on a mission to inspire, enhance, and connect imagination workers so that they can collaborate and problem solve wherever they may be. Welcome to the show, Mariano.

Mariano: Hello, Doug. And glad to be here.

Douglas: I’m really curious, Mariano. How did you get your start working in this field of bringing remote workers together to collaborate and do this imagine work and found a company to do that? It’s amazing.

Mariano: It is. And I was fortunate to be a mobile or remote worker. Ten years ago, I had a video-games company, and that company ultimately got acquired by Disney. So I was working for Disney. I’m from Argentina originally, but I was in the Mountain View office quite often. So I was “remote” because I was not really remote; I was just, like, distributed right? So my programming team was in Argentina. I was mostly in the U.S. I was designing a new game called Emotions. I was using Keynote to collect inspiration, and we can go further into the problem, but that sparked the idea of having an online space that felt more like a whiteboard, felt more like a project room. That’s how we started 10 years ago already.

Douglas: Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, I watched your presentation from MURAL Imagine recently, and you were sharing how you got your start using PowerPoint, or just reflecting on how you use it and how that helps you collect your thoughts. And it really, the light bulb went off for me, because we always talk about prototypes can be anything that we bring together to help visualize our ideas. And so we often talk about how PowerPoint can be a prototype. And so MURAL, in a way, is a tool to help build prototype or ideas and present them.

Mariano: Definitely a tool in a space to make space as we call for imagination, right? The reality is that words are great in humans. We rely on them to communicate. But, yeah, a picture, multiple pictures, a diagram, definitely much more powerful than a description, especially an oral description. There’s a lot been written on, yeah, the infamous Amazon six-pager. So it can do write ups. I think there’s room for everything, right? There’s definitely room for the write-up ones, the thought or the idea or the information is already cooked. But in that work in progress, I think there’s more space for more flexible space to gather your thoughts, get reactions from others, and build together that idea. And then, yes, putting in a more linear way to share out.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me. One of my favorite facilitation techniques is just to listen and capture what’s the words that are flying by. You are like, words are great, but. And that’s the problem is when words are just word soup and they’re all flying by and they just evaporate. It almost reminds me of one of those little videos or animations where, like, the thought bubbles are coming up and then just disappearing. And it’s important that we capture all those things because if we step back and look at it, we can find and visualize where our discrepancies are. If someone says, “This thing needs to be magical,” and someone else says, “It should not be magical,” we need to understand, because they probably aren’t completely disagreeing, but on the surface it appears so. But if we don’t capture those things and visualize them, there’s no way for us to dive in and understand that.

Mariano: You know it’s funny that teams that capture an idea is that it shouldn’t be one person doing describe role. It’s all the people involved in a meeting or a workshop should be participants and active participants. And one of the important things, too, there is not only sharing, but also active listening, and active listening and hopefully also documenting, because it’s amazing to see once people start documenting and other folks that are listening to a presenter or something, it’s funny to see how they add new ways of seeing whatever comment or thought. It’s amazing to see the gifs or sketches or icons start complimenting that core phrase that was said by someone.

Douglas: Yeah. It’s like we talk about one of the tenants of facilitation being yes/and. And essentially what you’re describing is the whole team is yes/and-ing silently and visually based on what’s being said. And so one little thought nugget that someone vocalizes can be transformed, almost like in parallel—talk about distributed working, right? We’re all in parallel or contributing to the same thing in a way that you just couldn’t do. If it was synchronous, it would take us much longer.

Mariano: Yes. And I always wonder, like in the old way, when we were in person, and, I mean, one person was talking in a group of 10 or something, of course, other people were thinking about things. And as I said, like when I sort of- the good practitioners of this type of work. They were holding their own posts and adding their own things. But sometimes the synchronicity there failed to leave the trace, right? They would forget about it, or what I was thinking there. When I’m seeing workshops happening in a digital realm right now on MURAL, I’m seeing that there’s a lot of, like, a multithreaded thinking going on, which I don’t really know yet if it’s good or bad, but it’s something. It’s true, because people were thinking anyway or reacting anyway to someone presenting. Now, this thing allows them to document that reaction to the presentations more fluidly. And I would love to make this a videocast next time so we can show some of that.

Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s really fascinating because I’ve seen that phenomenon as well. And it’s not just limited to presentations. I’ve seen it organically evolve, like even through a debrief or a fishbowl conversation, where you’ve got some folks talking, and then others are documenting and reacting to the talking. So they are contributing to Timestampwhat’s being captured, and it’s not just through one lens, right? If I’m a facilitator, I’m trying to capture as much as I can. But I definitely know there are moments where, “Man, there was something he said right before that. I totally forgot it.” And, you know, so part of it’s just kind of keeping up with everything, but also there’s how we interpret it, how we just subtly yes/and it. It’s really pretty incredible. 

So there’s a negative side to all of this awesome stuff that’s happening. And I’m sure you’re no stranger to this, having a tool, a software product, that is essential to remote work, and remote work just becoming the only way that we can work during the pandemic. You are just slammed with lots of new sign ups. And I’m sure that’s just increased the number of meetings and the amount of coordination and things that needs to get done. And Zoom fatigue is a serious thing. And how do we, as meeting attendees, meeting facilitators, how do we address these concerns around remote facilitation?

Mariano: So there’s a lot in that question, so I’ll start with the fatigue part. As you can listen to my voice, I need a rest. I’m doing speech-therapy sessions and also learning how to speak. It seems like I’ve been yelling at the screen, right? I don’t know how to speak, and I’m learning and relearning how to do that. So there’s a lot of things around meetings, right? There’s the being present and all the hours spent working and sitting down or standing up. There’s the input method of audio for my voice that’s not working. And yes, all of this gets accelerated with the fact that, in our case in particular, a lot of the world relies on us for a particular type of remote work. MURAL is not needed for all types of remote work. Probably, Zoom is much more ubiquitous and present, right? And they place all the blame on something like Zoom fatigue, where, again, they are a medium and a tool, and how people are using them is both good and bad and with other its implications.

But, yes, we’re fortunate to be able to support a lot of folks that are interested in bringing imagination to their work, how we call it, right? So those important moments around planning, around strategizing, around defining the future, but also using visual methods in design and in Agile to help us reflect, to help us celebrate, and do certain things that are little abstract parts of work where it’s super important, especially to align teams that are now all over the world. 

So, yes, Doug, it’s a responsibility because it’s not just about letting people work, but also helping them improve how they work. It’s not possible to run an eight-hour workshop online, or a three-day, eight-hour workshop online. And people are starting to quickly learn that, unlearn that, and learn the new way. So we’ve been doing a lot of work not only making sure that the systems are stable, scaling, trustworthy, but also bringing in features and know-how for the end users who are super under a lot of pressure and nervous because they’re learning ways of working and ways of working remote. So it’s tiring and rewarding.

Douglas: I would like to take just a moment to talk about that. You know, I’ve definitely experienced just exhaustion from having to pivot my company and make sure that things are pointed in the right direction and all that. And I actually started having massive headaches. It turned out it was a lot from eyestrain, so I had to adjust my monitors, get new glasses with blue blockers, and progressive lenses. I’m getting old, Mariano. So I’m curious if you have any tips, any advice for folks that are, how can we step away from this stuff or how can we adjust our imagination work and how we use the tools to make it less stressful, or whatnot?

Mariano: Sure. There’s definitely, like, a design of the day and the week component to the question, and then in particular, going into the actual work. And things that I’ve been doing to design the week is explicit about designing the week and the day, and then things happen and we change it. But at least filling the time to say, okay, what would I like to accomplish this weekend? What would I like to accomplish for myself, for my family, and for the business, too? So in the last few weeks, I didn’t respect it much, but in the beginning of the pandemic, in the first couple months, very much, which is two hours per day blocked for kids and coffee. I mean, in the middle of the day so that we can also do exercising with kids. So it’s like I hit two birds with a stone, and everybody is happy about that. And of course, time to reflect and time to plan baked in in the beginning and the end of the week.

Douglas: So, I want to dig into this exercise with the kids. So tell me how that works.

Mariano: Well, it’s hard to be a teacher. I mean, especially if you’re all day and being a “teacher” inside your company. So with kids, your level of energy’s low, so I found the best play sessions with them are also, in a way, facilitated. I’ve been doing sessions where we design a project or we design a bike route. And those are the ones that are more rewarding, where there is like a little bit of planning time, a little bit of execution time, and then reflection time. Or I bought a set of cones, for example, and we put in the street entrance and designed, you know paths for exercises. We run here, we walk there, run sideways here maybe with the ball, because if not, it’s very loose. Play is really hard to deal with, especially as an adult. You don’t have the power, infinite power of imagination that the kids do have. So, yeah, little scripted has been helping me. And of course it’s hard to persevere. But I come back every week, and at least once in that week, I go back to some sort of script method. 

I’ve actually been thinking about how to take that to work, right, because in the old way, maybe, like, last year, for example, we were able to bring the whole company to Argentina for a week, and we had a lot of time to just hang out. But really, I always thought about the hanging-out part of work. I say something that also got me a little nervous because I thought we could be using it for better work. I mean, in a way, as a fan of sports, right, I like that sports car, like a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have rules, and then you can do some improvisation in the middle. But you know what the purpose of the get-together is, when it comes to work, water-cooler time, I never found that super interesting. 

So, yeah, trying to guide just play time and not scripted time, but using scripted and play-guided script to help us bring in the creative juices, level the playing field for introverts and extroverts, to be able to participate, and try to persevere in doing that over and over so that we can get better at it because it’s not easy to connect with people through a screen.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of this BBC report that I read that said most pointless meetings are actually a form of therapy. And the thing that became really clear to me was, well, if that’s the case, we should be intentional about it rather than just letting it organically happen, because people need it. Let’s program it in and make sure we have really good therapy and we really check in. And, you know, I think that’s a reason why a lot of people design an icebreaker. It’s unfortunate the way a lot of it develops, though, because when it’s not really intentional and not tied to the purpose, there’s a real missed opportunity because we can do something that’s gracious and purposeful. And again, it can take us a bit further. But you’re absolutely right that we have to have time for the team.

Mariano: Yeah. Making time for no goals but structured play is interesting.

Douglas: Yeah. I want to come back to the ninja course that you built out in your driveway. Did you guys use MURAL to plan it before you went out to put it together?

Mariano: No, dude. It’s too much in front of Mural, it’s uh-

Douglas: No doubt. That’s like trying to get away, right?

I’ve always respected MURAL for your efforts to support facilitators. It’s very clear that as a design and product consideration, when you’re thinking about your roadmap and building features to support what we do as facilitators. And so I’d just like to hear a little bit about your philosophy around why that’s important and where you see it could go, not in so much in the sense of, like, what’s next on the roadmap, but from a philosophical standpoint. Like, where could that take us?

Mariano: Sure. So you mention mission early on or on imagination workers and powering them up globally. So when I talk about why we do what we do, and generally, I start with imagination and making room for imagination at work, make space for imagination at work. But imagination at work is not easy, right. For some of us, for certain cases, it may come naturally, but there’s a lot of paralysis. So that’s why we also believe—and we learned this early on in our journey—that the guided methods that people like you, Douglas, like, consultants and folks that are thinking of how to make this type of work happen—have put together alignment diagrams and methods were key to bring these teams together and ultimately help them with the job of creative problem solving and creative problem solving. So that’s one part, right? Like, we don’t support all types of work in MURAL. We just don’t need it for everything. 

But when there’s something big to go through with, again, workshop-type mindset, you should probably rely on MURAL for that. And you should rely on MURAL whenever and wherever you might be. I mean, the idea that we go to innovation centers to innovate, that was always interesting to me because shouldn’t we be innovating in small and big scale all the time? So that’s the obvious thing around remote work that we support. 

But then the fourth bucket, pillar, or vector, whatever we want to call it, that we care about is facilitation. And as you mentioned, that we have a team focus on that. We have content based on that, because you observed at the best-run meetings there are some professional facilitators, or someone takes the role or many of them take the role of a facility—well, facilitation, right?. Like, doing facilitation. So we believe it’s a core competency for now and the future and because of the need for more multidisciplinary teams. And yes, and doing this in person is hard. Doing this remotely is virtually impossible. So that’s why we tried to do a lot of community, a lot of content sharing, and a lot of little features in the product that we believe could be great for folks like you to be able to guide, to ask questions, to bring a little bit of fun and play into these meetings, and, ultimately, make your participants achieve the end goal of the meeting.

Douglas: Yeah. It just dawned on me that good agenda design can also really improve this sense of Zoom fatigue and meeting fatigue, because if we’re just going back-to-back meetings and there’s not a good sense of closure, there’s no good arc—I mean, imagine if you went to the movies, and you watched a movie, and every movie just ended right at the climax, and then you were right at the next movie, and it’s just like action just thrown at you the entire time, there’s no on-ramp. It’d be like having to jump off your—you’re flying to Cincinnati, and you have to jump off and parachute down to get off the plane.

Mariano: I’m watching the timer right now in the podcast software. I’m realizing at minute 22, 23 now, and yet being aware enough of time, of first starting the meeting also with a purpose, right? Why are we meeting? What’s the end goal of this meeting? And trying to have an agenda, but also acknowledge that maybe there’s some flexibility that you can bake into that agenda. And if you’re not able to close the meeting, probably there are two things. One is if you’re consistently not closing in time, probably there’s like a meeting design there, you might need more meeting time or more workshop time in the future to make sure that you get to closing. Or the nice thing about this remote situation that we’re all in is that you can also call it a pause, right? And open up the next day or next week. People are starting to realize that they can unbundle workshops and unbundle meetings and not squeeze out everything from that workshop that first day. So there’s a little bit of flexibility in my malleability that we’re able to do to have here in the work that we have right now where we are all peers and that we’re checking in digitally to the space.

Douglas: I love that concept of unbundling and how we can split workshops apart. And I’m going to switch gears here a little bit and talk about something that I heard from one of your MURAL employees, Hailey Temple, I was sharing a Loom over. There was something neat that I’d found about how I was using MURAL, and I was trying to explain it to her. And I thought, “It’d be so much easier just to record a quick Loom so she can see what I’m talking about.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I love Loom. Mariano always records really great Looms for the team to get us motivated.” And I thought to myself, that’s incredible. Such a great use of a tool for a distributed team to get them excited and motivated. So I would just love to hear some inspiration you might be to offer other leaders. Like, what should they be thinking about? Why do you use these tools to send videos out to the team? Why is that important? And how can we motivate our distributed teams?

Mariano: Sure. So, yeah, normally it’s about recording media, screen recording video. There’s another one called Vidyard that’s more customer facing. And there’s probably a few others. And so, we went through a very tough time, right, in last six months now, maybe four, depending on the part of the world. We’re hitting our lowest pandemic rate. It’s not a, we say, to work from home when we’re walking around and being free of working on the beach or whatever. People are locked down in their houses in Argentina, where a lot of our guys are for 120 days now or so. So it’s super, super tough to order them. So, acknowledging that and acknowledging it in a way that it’s, again, as a human as possible is important, and I’m putting that on video. And on video that I generally compliment with a MURAL, with some visuals to explain that it has been a good practice and something that people appreciate. And it doesn’t take me much time, and people can watch it in whichever time they want. And, yeah, I’m getting positive reactions because I appreciate their work; knowledge that it’s not easy; share some thoughts, ideas, and plans. 

And another thing that we do also and we did and I was super happy how it all went out is that we made space for celebration also. When we wrapped up our very challenging, positively challenging quarter in June, in November we coordinated to make sure that we sent boxes to everybody in the company with a little mimosa kit and a little pub party bulbs and content and Schwab from the company to each of them in their homes. And I made time to celebrate. And I came back to the message that I was repeating over and over and over with new people coming in. It’s necessary in those Loom videos. And I repeated that message again on the accounts  where we celebrated. Acknowledging that, again, we had accomplished something big together, and because we worked as a team and that now was a good time for us to acknowledge all of that and celebrate. And there was probably one of our, like a good moment where we also came together as a team and reflected back on those initial plans videos into something that came full circle. And I look forward to doing more of those again.

Douglas: That’s amazing. I have been thinking a lot about tactile objects and supplies and things, and bringing that into your workshops or you’re all hands or any kind of experience. Just because we’re all distributed and we can’t be in office together doesn’t mean we can’t send everybody the T-shirt or the awesome care package. That’s really great.

Mariano: There’s a company called Sliced in New York, and they call it an API to sell pizzas. And I’ve been thinking a cool feature for the future would be, like, press button, send pizzas, through MURAL. So we’ll see how that goes, and it gets complicated with global teams, though.

Douglas: Yeah, no doubt. Incredible. 

So one of my favorite questions is around meetings, of course, on my mission to help people have better meetings everywhere. And I’m just curious what your go-to is. If you could change anything about the way most meetings are run, what would it be?

Mariano: I mentioned something before, right, so I think there’s two things. One is acknowledge which type of meeting it is, and related to that, open up with the end goal of the meeting. For example, when I do first candidate meetings on recruiting, I try to be really curious, but very explicit about the end goal of this meeting is to see if we could be a fit for each other. I took that one from sales training, actually. There’s a firm that we hire called Winning by Design that I really like. And they teach the sales guys to open up with appreciate taking the time today. Check time. Do you still have 30 minutes for us to go through this meeting? And the third thing is the end goal of this meeting is to see if we could be a fit for each other. And the corollary of that also is if in the middle of this meeting we believe that we’re not a fit for each other, for whichever reason, we accomplished the goal, and we can end the meeting earlier. If we also accomplish the goal of, we can, we can be a fit for each other,  great. And maybe you do another check in later on to accomplish another goal, which is go deep into your requirements or go deep into your background to understand if we are a fit for each other. 

So I think that opening up, we have very clear goal is something that is very important. And the other thing that it’s also related to the beginning is related to checking in. So checking in, fully checking in as individuals, as collaborators, and acknowledge that that’s our goal, which is the role of each other, and how are you going to be participating here? Not as spectators, hopefully, or if you are spectators, acknowledge it and claim your role, but also acknowledging that maybe you’re not needed for a meeting and that’s okay. So goal first, roles and responsibilities second, and checking in, and checking in with a fun exercise that gets the creative juices going.

Douglas: Now you’ve got me curious. What is your favorite check-in exercise?

Mariano: This is not my favorite one, but it’s a funny one. The other day, I put up the lyrics of Despacito, the song. And I had each of my leadership team members go for a phrase. And it was hilarious to hear the English-speaking guys trying to sing Despacito in English.

Douglas: That’s amazing. That reminds me of one that, essentially, everyone, first round, puts a name of a song, like a hit song, one of those songs that just gets stuck in your head, you know? So everyone contributes one, and then we shuffle them up. And then everyone draws the name, and then you have to sing that song. So you had to sing the song you randomly drew. And yeah, it’s a little awkward.

Mariano: So, I mean, a question that we ask new team members to reply to when we introduce themselves to everybody else. The first one is, like, how you plan to make an impact. Sorry—so, first of all, why did you choose MURAL? The second one is, how you plan to make an impact. And then the third one is, tell us something weird about you. So I think that—and why are you in this meeting, how you plan to make an impact in this meeting, and then something fun are all things that we could bring into important big meetings.

Douglas: Yeah, that’s great. You know, it doesn’t have to be the all hands for, you know, someone’s new. That’s when you could be pretty evergreen, those questions, especially if you shift them from the company to the meeting, it’s awesome. 

So I’m curious. What have you recently discovered or kind of bumped into that gives you hope and makes you curious?

Mariano: That silence was on purpose. So the use of silence, right? I mean, as evidenced by my voice, I have not been silent enough. I mean, talking, talking, talking, pitching, pitching, pitching. And silence, two observations. One is from the sales training, was, like, leave space after a question. Let them answer, and let them continue answering. Let you’re, the person you’re interviewing, just go for it. And the other day, we invited Maria Judis to talk, and she opened up with a silent moment, and also put together, like, a little sticky note with on camera that said, “Wait,” and says, “Yeah. Why am I talking?” And as a moment to, again, leave space for others to do that, especially someone they want them to share, it is close and so on. So, yeah, the use of silence. And it’s weird in a remote environment because sometimes silence is catalyzed via a faulty mute set up; or bad connection; or am I talking? You’re talking? And people don’t want to bump into each other. So, yeah, I mean, silence as a tool.

Douglas: I love it. And that’s the second time “wait” has appeared on the podcast, so it’s a popular one in these circles, especially with active listening being so critical to facilitation. So I love that you bring that up. 

I’ve even been exploring with using MURAL as a tool to allow us to play with silence. And so we’ll do some work in the plenary session where everyone’s together in the main Zoom room. And then I’ll send folks into the MURALs to do some work. I won’t send them to the breakout rooms yet, but they’re already working in their breakout-room area in the MURAL. The reason I don’t send them to the breakout room yet is that it’s much easier to enforce that silence, because if anyone starts talking, then another group can hear them. And so if I send them to their breakout rooms immediately, then they all start talking in the breakout rooms. And so designing around that silence can be a real powerful thing.

Mariano: You mentioned that we have a facilitation team. That’s one of things we observe, right? Besides unbundling and synchronous and synchronous work, even within the “synchronicity” of a meeting or a workshop, there are moments where you want solo work, small teamwork, plenaries, as you mentioned. And as a matter of fact, you showed me some of that when we were in the Google Sprint conference in San Francisco and you were facilitating your workshop on liberating structures. So I don’t need to teach you. And I learned that from you. So we have a feature coming soon called private mode where people will be in private mode. We acknowledge that people also do breakout MURALs or breakout sessions in a MURAL. So we’re baking that. As you know, there’s a new celebration function in the product or the timer or the whole thing. So that’s where we do most of our innovation, to be honest with you, right, on the little things that add up to what we call the facilitation superpowers, where yeah, it’s two-hundred bucks for facilitators to be able to run better meetings. But a good practice, as you mentioned, is definitely leave time for solo work first and then share out.

Douglas: So, Mariano, I’d love to hear any kind of final thoughts you might have for the listeners. Anything that’s top of mind that you’d love to share?

Mariano: Insist on celebrations. We’re all going through a very challenging time. I mean, the virus, spikes are coming all over the world. We’re going to have to go back inside. Winter will be coming soon in the northern hemisphere. Pay attention to the southern hemisphere, people that are shut down and in winter and cold. It’s not fun there. So make moment of fun, of celebration, and acknowledging that we’re all accomplishing good things together. And micro celebrations and bigger celebrations and learn how to celebrate remotely, which is super hard. And so that would be my ask for all of you.

Douglas: Excellent. Well, Mariano, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. 

How can folks find you if they want to look up your work, find MURAL, find out more about you. Where should they go?

Mariano: The website is mural.co. And my Twitter or LinkedIn, I use batmelon. It’s a joke that I can tell the audience at some point, but it relates to Batman and Three Melons, my game studio. We tried to show up being dogs, being webinars, and inspire everybody with our brain to use it for imagination. We believe that imagination and collaboration, it’s what makes us human, right? The Homo sapiens that started our civilizations imagined language, imagined civilizations, shared them with each other, and for small teams to be able to build civilization. And the good thing about computers taking over knowledge work and data crunching and other processing is that we can come back to this type of work that is so rewarding and so fun.

 So follow us if you care about that. And thank you, Douglas, for also spreading the gospel of facilitation and reward work. Glad to be here in the show. And hello, everybody out there that are facilitators. We want to help you out, and reach out if you need anything. 

Douglas: Thanks again, Mariano. It’s been a pleasure.

Marino: Cheers, mate.Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.